In the study of poetry, we're always encouraged to read the poems aloud, as most poems were intended to be read. But if you like me and you both have a roommate and hate the sound of your own voice, reading poems aloud can be both difficult and a bit embarrassing. For that reason, I often wander onto the internet to find recordings of these poems read by people who sound much better aloud than I do. While such recordings greatly inform my reading of the poem, tapping into emotions and vocal emphases that cannot be portrayed on the page, these recordings also connect the poetry of the past to the culture and events of the present, emphasizing poetry's power to transcend time and remain relevant in a changing world.
John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" is an inherently musical poem with his great use of alliteration and assonance and regular rhyme scheme, as would be expected from a poem about the musical nightingale. When read aloud, though, the emotion of the poem and the reverence the speaker has for the bird becomes obvious. I have returned time and time again to the reading of the poem below only partially because it was read by Benedict Cumberbatch (I'm a college-aged female; I'm not going to deny that that was part of the appeal). He captures the emotion and the desperation of the poem in slight vocal variances, drawing out Keats's repeated exclamations of "Away! away!" in a manner that makes the listener pay attention to a repetition that would normally be glanced over on the page. The fullness of the assonance of Keats's poem, emphasized by the spoken performance, is pulled into stark contrast with the lines filled with sharp consonants, so that such lines as, "In such an ecstasy!" serve as a sort of impactful pause in the otherwise lulling, soothing reading. The practice of reading the poem aloud also calls for a greater amount of attention to the punctuation of the poem, forcing one to pause at commas and dashes and emphasizing the lines differentiated with exclamation marks. Such marks give further insight into the mental process behind Keats's poem, where pauses in his train of thought and excitements occurred. Accompanied by fading violin music, Cumberbatch concludes the poem, with its final two questions, with a similarly fading voice, trailing off in the question of "Do I wake or sleep?" in a manner suggesting the descent into sleep, as words slow and slur until they are cut off. Cumberbatch's reading works to emphasize the emotions of the poem, lending the words the inherent human quality that is lost when they are viewed solely on the printed page.
Recordings of poems also give us access to cultural meanings of the poems that are inherently obvious in the poems themselves. These readings can indicate the cultural meaning that has been added to the poems by their many readers. F. Scott Fitzgerald was said to have cried every time he read Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and a recovered recording of him reading the first three stanzas allows listeners access to the love he held for the poem, while also drawing attention to changes in the published versions of the poems, so that Fitzgerald's version of the poem reads "where youth grows dumb, and fever-thin, and dies," while the Norton version reads, "Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies." Thus, listeners are given access to both the poem's publication history and its impact.
Recordings of poems also speak to poetry's ability to transcend time to apply emotionally to current human events. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote "Adonais" as an elegy for John Keats, a poetic tribute to a man Shelley respected and admired. Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones read part of Shelley's elegy at the memorial concert for Brian Jones, the original band leader, two days after Jones was found drowned in his swimming pool. Jagger used Shelley's words of respect for his friend Keats to convey his own feelings towards Jones, thus using poetry as a way to deal with human grief.
Finally, recordings of poem can find their way into popular culture. Since poems by Keats and Shelley often deal with universal themes of the human condition, they can often be applied to movies, television shows, music, and, unfortunately, captions on Facebook profile pictures. One recent example is the use of Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" in the television show Breaking Bad. Since I do not watch the show, I cannot speak to the appropriateness of such a pairing, but it does reflect poetry's ability to continue to affect popular culture centuries after it was written.
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